A company profile that was just submitted: Middlespot, another startup taking a crack at making the web search experience more visual, joining the likes of SearchMe, Snap and Viewzi.
Like its counterparts, Middlespot aims to enhance searching for websites, images, news, Amazon and even Twitter by returning screenshots of results rather than just text links.
Kicking off a keyword-based search opens two columns: to the left, you’ll get standard stuff like title, summary and full link, and on the right you’ll get a visual representation of search results. In the latter column, you can make the frames bigger or smaller by using the slider or scrolling your mouse wheel, and hovering over the boxes will highlight them and offer a couple of options. It’s all pretty straightforward, so check it out.
Next to visual search, Middlespot is also somewhat of a social bookmarking service, since it lets you save search results in a so-called ‘workpad’, an extra layer that saves your favorited pages and wraps a number of social services around them, like commenting, sharing via e-mail and embedding (see below). It lets you rename the workpad results, add a custom URL and also offers related search results on-site. If you register for an account, you can backup your workpad, but if you note your workpad ID elsewhere you don’t even have to do that since you can fetch the saved results later. Last but not least, Middlespot offers a number of tools like bookmarklets and browser plugins that make it easier to remember to use the service when looking for something on the web.
http://middlespot.com/embed_new.php?w=400&h=200&tw=320&wpKey=0Hw1irshv5FOmP1ezVOwXR
The problem with Middlespot is that its overall website design is below par, and it’s horribly slow with current response times that will prove to be unacceptable for the majority of people who are used to getting search results much faster. But since Middlespot is just two guys doing this in their spare time, those gripes feel like splitting hairs and frankly it’s impressive what they’ve built without a dime of funding and limited time resources.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
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